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One Book, One Cozad Selects: Pioneer Girl: A True Story Of Growing Up On The Prairie

One Book, One Cozad launches their third One Book, One Cozad program with the selection of Pioneer Girl: A True Story of Growing Up on the Prairie by Andrea Warren. Pioneer Girl is the story of Grace McCance Snyder based upon her memoir No Time on My Hands as well as additional information gathered by the author. In 1885, when she was three, Grace and her family became homesteaders outside of Cozad, Nebraska. Living together in a sod house, her family faced storms, fire, and drought. Grace’s story is woven among pages of the education, happiness and sadness of all homesteading children.

The author, Andrea Warren, grew up in Newman Grove, Nebraska. Ms. Warren graduated from the University of Nebraska with a master’s degree in British Literature and taught high school English and history in Hastings before moving to Kansas to work as a newspaper reporter and freelance writer. Ms. Warren has written several highly acclaimed books including Orphan Train Rider: One Boy’s True Story, which won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Outstanding Nonfiction and Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Death Camps, a Robert F. Sibert Award Honor Book. Her most recent book, published in 2015, is entitled The Boy Who Became Buffalo Bill: Growing Up Billy Cody in Bleeding Kansas. Regularly scheduled book discussions and events will be held monthly at the library for all interested persons beginning in February. The author will appear in several Nebraska libraries in April to make presentations about Pioneer Girl, including Cozad, Lexington, and Kearney. A special set of books will be set aside near the library’s circulation desk for all of 2017 for those wishing to check out the book. Additionally, a special tab at www.wilsonpubliclibrary.com will have information regarding up-coming events. Wilson Public Library is encouraging all local book clubs to thoughtfully consider adding Pioneer Girl: A True Story of Growing Up on the Prairie to their selection lists for 2017.

The notion of a one book/one city (state, county, church, etc.) started with an idea by Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl. First initiated in 1998 by the Washington Center for the Book, the Library of Congress reports that such programs are abundant around the world. In fact, in 2017, One Book, One Nebraska will celebrate its twelfth year of a statewide program. Wilson Public Library agrees with the Nebraska Center for the Book’s philosophy that “reading great literature provokes us to think about ourselves, our environment and our relationships,” and that “talking about great literature with friends, families and neighbors often adds richness and depth to the experience of reading.”